PROBLEMS WITH SAYING WE MUST KNOW GOOD
Moral arrogance: Assuming your own definition of “good” is the only valid one can lead to dogmatism.
Dismissal of others’ perspectives: You may ignore or invalidate viewpoints that don’t match your moral framework.
Oversimplification of complex issues: Ethical questions are often nuanced; claiming certainty can flatten important complexities.
Justification of harmful actions: People often commit harm believing they are serving a “greater good.”
Inflexibility and resistance to growth: Certainty discourages self-reflection and moral evolution.
Imposing values on others: It can lead to coercion—forcing individuals or communities to adopt your version of “good.”
Blind spots and bias: Personal or cultural biases may masquerade as universal truths without being examined.
Conflict escalation: Competing claims about the “true good” often fuel social, political, and religious conflict.
Moral exclusion: Those who disagree can be cast as “bad,” dehumanized, or treated unjustly.
Stifling dialogue: True ethical conversation becomes difficult when one party believes the answer is already settled.
Feeling that a God is helping you with it all makes it worse - the fact is that no two people agree on what "God" told them.
THE ARGUMENT
The analogy of a red or green light highlights the idea that even if objective moral truths exist, they might only provide binary information—permissible or impermissible—without specifying degrees of goodness or badness. On this view, moral facts would function more like categorical constraints than value-laden gradients. Likewise, free will could be understood as a minimal capacity to choose between alternatives rather than a richly textured inner power, meaning its presence or absence is a simple factual matter rather than a spectrum of metaphysical depth. The tendency to treat morality and free will as complex, emotionally charged, or meaning-laden phenomena may stem more from human psychological interpretation than from the structure of the underlying realities themselves; our minds elaborate narratives, intentions, and values that go far beyond the basic logical distinctions those concepts might contain.
There is no empirical proof or decisive philosophical evidence establishing that morality or free will must contain richer structures than these basic distinctions. Psychology, wishful thinking and habit are disproportionally involved.
The same would be true of God who is based on the ideas. He is seen as the symbol and representative of moral goodness who has given us free will as a gift so we might use it to serve as moral agents. He is in fact a human construct - at the root of it all is the human quest for power.
GOD MAKES IT WORSE
God as being effectively goodness itself, and the creator of all from nothing and being perfect would be the highest good. We cannot even imagine how good he is. Evil would be a lack of a good that is not there - a privation.
If God is the highest good, then any act not done only for God falls short, therefore is “evil” by the privation logic.
Classical theism logically condemns all finite human goodness.
Not only are we told that we cannot grasp how good God is, we corrupt how we see his goodness anyway.
Human evil is seen as a lack but also as a twisting of good. For example, the person needs to think and feel and those are good things. But they are abused. So there is an element there of evil being good in the wrong place and wrong time.
If so, and if all human good falls short of perfect good anyway, then everything becomes morally fuzzy, and the concept of evil loses motivational force.
Some suggest like Mani, that evil is in fact the manifestation of a substance - it is not an absence of good but a real power.
Christians oppose that for it would mean saying that if there is one true God he is to blame for evil.
Would they affirm this?
It is better to think, like the Christian Science cult, that evil is not there at all and is only an illusion than to think it's a power?
Yes despite how Christian Science prevents compassion. If you don't believe suffering people really suffer, as the cult commands, then you are hard-hearted.
This test shows that there are ideological and disturbing attitudes behind Christian theology. Lack of compassion is implicitly but cautiously welcomed.
There is no concern for how seeing evil as a force could be the best way to inspire compassion.
JESUS
Jesus told us to hate sin so much that we would rather have an eye gouged out than use the eye to sin with. Say by looking lustfully at someone. He makes this hate good though it is horrible and evil. Jesus believed it was good for God to be an autocrat. His idea of goodness was dangerous. If he did not literally want gouging, he wanted psychological gouging.
CASE STUDY
A baby girl dies at seven months of meningitis.
Was this bad? Yes.
Was God bad for letting this happen? Theism says no. It would say, "She lived for seven months. That was good. The child's death strictly speaking was just a form of good that did harm. There was no real evil in it for God was with her and took her. The child and her parents should be grateful she existed at all. God is not bound to keep her alive or even make her in the first place".
How could you know what moral or any good is with a doctrine of savagery, with a doctrine as cold and harsh as that? People have been manipulated to feeling warm with God.
A person, who lives to adulthood, saying a child should be grateful for what time she got is certainly an argument for why church pews should be empty.